a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.

Smith’s true subject was the friction between individual desire and societal norms.

Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, was first and foremost a philosopher.

“Experts”—from criminologists to real-estate agents—use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda.

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.

parents use a name to signal their own expectations of how successful their children will be.

but many parents, whether they realize it or not, like the sound of names that sound “successful.”